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What is the biggest explosion in the universe · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, I have a physics question for you. All right,
0:11
Speaker 1: I didn't have a daily banana, but I'm ready. What
0:13
Speaker 1: makes explosions so awesome? They are awesome? But is that
0:18
Speaker 1: a physics question? Yeah? You know, like in the movies
0:21
Speaker 1: they always really action here walking away from an explosion
0:24
Speaker 1: in slow motion and it looks really cool. You know,
0:27
Speaker 1: does physics tell us why that is so cool? Physics
0:31
Speaker 1: is the reason why it's cool. Man, Physics makes things
0:34
Speaker 1: cool everything except physicist. I'm pitching a movie where a
0:39
Speaker 1: physicist is the action hero slow motion walking away from
0:42
Speaker 1: the explosion. It's called lap Code Action Hero. You're not
0:45
Speaker 1: going to fund the sequel for that one, Kanna reeves.
0:47
Speaker 1: I'm issuing an invitation for a screen test. They tried that,
0:50
Speaker 1: didn't they. That was that movie where he that's your
0:53
Speaker 1: wife's favorite movie? Yeah Fusion. Yeah, he's a he's an
0:57
Speaker 1: action here and he's a physicist. Basically, can happen cold Fusion?
1:01
Speaker 1: Two more slow motion explosions? Does that make you feel funny?
1:06
Speaker 1: Like to know that your spouse is favorite movie is
1:08
Speaker 1: about a physicist portrayed by Kenny No. It makes me
1:12
Speaker 1: feel like she thinks physicists are sexy. I mean I'd
1:14
Speaker 1: rather that than having a physicist be played by Danny
1:16
Speaker 1: de Vito, Bie am or hand, a cartoonists and the
1:35
Speaker 1: creator of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a
1:39
Speaker 1: particle physicist and I don't wear a lab coat, but
1:41
Speaker 1: I consider myself a science action hero. Nice. Do you
1:46
Speaker 1: code in slow motion too? My code explodes, man, I
1:51
Speaker 1: walk away those people's minds. Yeah, the explosions are all mental.
1:55
Speaker 1: I blew your mind with my amazing coding. Well, look
2:00
Speaker 1: them to our mind. Explosion of a podcast Daniel and
2:03
Speaker 1: Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio,
2:06
Speaker 1: in which we talk about all the things in the
2:08
Speaker 1: universe that do blow our minds and that are currently
2:11
Speaker 1: blowing the minds of scientists today, and we walk you
2:15
Speaker 1: through them and explain them to you and what we
2:16
Speaker 1: hope is an understandable and maybe even entertaining style. Yeah,
2:20
Speaker 1: we talk about all the amazing stuff out there that
2:23
Speaker 1: is just sitting there waiting for us to discover it
2:25
Speaker 1: and to tell us about things that we want to
2:29
Speaker 1: know about the universe. But we also talk about the
2:32
Speaker 1: events and all the crazy and wild and sometimes dangerous
2:36
Speaker 1: stuff that happens out there in the cosmos. That's right,
2:38
Speaker 1: because if you look up at the night sky, you
2:40
Speaker 1: are looking at one of the most amazing shows in
2:43
Speaker 1: the universe. It's not necessarily put on for your enjoyment,
2:47
Speaker 1: but it's a pretty spectacular fireworks display. You know. It
2:50
Speaker 1: is true that when you look out into this the
2:52
Speaker 1: night sky and you look at all the stars, you
2:54
Speaker 1: think that they look pretty and twinkling, But really what
2:57
Speaker 1: you're looking at is is billions and billion some giant
3:01
Speaker 1: explosions happening all the time. Yes, it is very dramatic
3:04
Speaker 1: fireworks display, and it's going on all the time. It's
3:07
Speaker 1: been going on for billions of years, and I like
3:10
Speaker 1: to think of it as like the best view in
3:11
Speaker 1: the universe, because not only is it huge dramatic explosions,
3:15
Speaker 1: bigger than anything we could imagine here on Earth, but
3:17
Speaker 1: you're also looking across billions and billions of miles. It's
3:21
Speaker 1: amazing to me how much of our lives we spend
3:23
Speaker 1: without looking up at the night sky. You go around
3:26
Speaker 1: your daily business and some people never even look up
3:29
Speaker 1: at the night sky. But there's so much incredible universe
3:32
Speaker 1: out there waiting for us to look at it. But yeah,
3:34
Speaker 1: we like to talk about fun things that happened in
3:37
Speaker 1: big explosions, and and sometimes we like to talk about
3:39
Speaker 1: the biggest things that happened out there in the universe,
3:42
Speaker 1: the biggest, the loudest, the craziest, the smallest, the quietest,
3:47
Speaker 1: the wettest, the driest, because they remind us of the scale.
3:56
Speaker 1: Our cozy little life here on Earth is a very
3:59
Speaker 1: narrow sli ice of the kind of environments that are
4:01
Speaker 1: out there in the universe. And so we want to
4:04
Speaker 1: blow your mind by reminding you that most of the
4:06
Speaker 1: universe is quite different. Most of the universe is much
4:09
Speaker 1: more dramatic than the kind of things we experience here
4:12
Speaker 1: on Earth. And we're the best ways to learn that
4:14
Speaker 1: is to go do the extremes, the coldest, the brightest,
4:17
Speaker 1: the darkest, the hottest. Yeah, and so everyone loves explosions,
4:21
Speaker 1: of course, and so to the other podcast, we'll be
4:23
Speaker 1: asking a question about what is the big explosion in
4:32
Speaker 1: the universe. We've talked about explosions in this podcast before,
4:36
Speaker 1: you know, like supernovas are big explosions in nuclear when
4:40
Speaker 1: you blow up a nuclear bomb, what happens. We had
4:42
Speaker 1: an episode about that, but here we're talking about the
4:46
Speaker 1: biggest explosion in the entire universe. Like if you did
4:49
Speaker 1: a survey of everything, that is, what would be the
4:52
Speaker 1: coolest explosion to film in slow motion and then have
4:55
Speaker 1: Kenna Rees walks at away from them precisely? Or Daniel
4:59
Speaker 1: are annual? Of course, Daniel float away. You know any
5:04
Speaker 1: lab coat wearing physicists, we are all equally sexy. Do
5:08
Speaker 1: you wear a lab coats, Daniel? Is that for safety
5:10
Speaker 1: or just for because you're a c is too high
5:13
Speaker 1: in your office? I wear lab coat when I'm gonna
5:15
Speaker 1: do a really complicated calculation, you know, just for protection
5:18
Speaker 1: because I break something, because the sweat pouring out of
5:23
Speaker 1: your forehead and the intensity of the typing is just
5:27
Speaker 1: just do you want to protect your clothes? Yeah? And
5:29
Speaker 1: you know, if you think really hard about something, you're
5:31
Speaker 1: creating very high energy density in your brain which could
5:34
Speaker 1: collapse to a black hole. And you know, I think
5:36
Speaker 1: a lab coat would be good protection there really to
5:39
Speaker 1: protect you. Or if my grad student is doing all
5:44
Speaker 1: the thinking, then I need a lab to protect myself.
5:49
Speaker 1: That's really what I'm worried about. But we are talking
5:51
Speaker 1: today about explosions because there was a recent article crowning
5:54
Speaker 1: a new champion explosion of the universe, and a lot
5:58
Speaker 1: of our listeners wrote in asking us, can you please
6:00
Speaker 1: explain what's going on? How is this possible? What's the
6:04
Speaker 1: deal with this crazy article? Wow? So this is a
6:06
Speaker 1: like hot off the presses. I mean the the article
6:09
Speaker 1: just came out last week crowning the new biggest explosion
6:12
Speaker 1: in the universe? Ye ever seen or did you think
6:14
Speaker 1: this is this? Is it ever seen? No? I think
6:17
Speaker 1: it's very unlikely that we will see the biggest explosion
6:19
Speaker 1: in the universe, or that we have seen it. But
6:21
Speaker 1: it's the biggest explosion that we have ever seen. I mean,
6:25
Speaker 1: the more you look, the more you see extremes, and
6:28
Speaker 1: for this particular category of explosion, there's a potential for
6:31
Speaker 1: even bigger ones. I guess you kind of maybe don't
6:33
Speaker 1: want to see the big explosion in the universe. You
6:35
Speaker 1: want to see it on a movie screen, but you
6:37
Speaker 1: don't want to be there unless you have a really
6:39
Speaker 1: nice lab coat that could protect you. Yeah. But so,
6:42
Speaker 1: as usual, Daniel was curious to see how many people
6:44
Speaker 1: had heard of this discovery or even have thought about
6:47
Speaker 1: what is the biggest explosion in the universe? So I
6:50
Speaker 1: walked around campus and I asked folks just after this
6:53
Speaker 1: article came out, what makes the biggest explosions in the universe?
6:58
Speaker 1: So think about it for a second. It is so,
7:00
Speaker 1: and as you what the biggest explosion in the universe was,
7:03
Speaker 1: what would you answer? Here's what people had to say.
7:06
Speaker 1: I think it's a supernova, probably when like really big
7:09
Speaker 1: things collide like stars, stars. I guess, yeah, just like
7:15
Speaker 1: normal stars doing their thing. It's when they die, right
7:18
Speaker 1: or is it is that they collapse when they knew that,
7:20
Speaker 1: like the star exploding one of the biggest I can
7:22
Speaker 1: think of, explosion of the star supernova. I think it's
7:26
Speaker 1: just called something supernova. Maybe starts dying like astronomical Yeah,
7:30
Speaker 1: then that type of like I don't think anything man made.
7:33
Speaker 1: I want to say stars. Well, it was just reported
7:36
Speaker 1: that the most massive explosion I ever recorded was a
7:40
Speaker 1: black hole. They believe are specifically the convitation of the
7:44
Speaker 1: wall was created by the plasma admitted by the black hole. Um,
7:47
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly where or at the center of
7:50
Speaker 1: our galaxy or something like that. Maybe your mom, so
7:52
Speaker 1: it's a nuke alright, A lot of great guesses. Most
7:56
Speaker 1: people say it's supernovas. Yep, supernova is a popular one.
7:59
Speaker 1: People have heard of it. The supernova pr team has
8:02
Speaker 1: done a great job, you know, does it does have
8:05
Speaker 1: their names super super you know. But you know, hypernovas
8:09
Speaker 1: are even bigger, and nobody talks about hypernovas that hypernovas. Hypernovas, Yeah,
8:16
Speaker 1: we've talked about on the podcast. They're just like a
8:18
Speaker 1: super big category of supernovas. He's saying, I forgot, I guess.
8:24
Speaker 1: I guess it's just not as sticky as supernovas. Not
8:26
Speaker 1: a sticky The focus group for supernovas did a better job. Yeah, anyway,
8:31
Speaker 1: it was a popular answer, and it makes sense because
8:33
Speaker 1: those are really big explosions. Some people said nuclear weapons
8:37
Speaker 1: times too, like if you multiplied a new weapon. There
8:40
Speaker 1: were a couple of people who said nuclear bombs, and
8:42
Speaker 1: I think they just haven't really expanded their mind out
8:45
Speaker 1: to the astronomical. They were thinking about the biggest explosions
8:49
Speaker 1: on Earth, even though I asked for the biggest explosions
8:51
Speaker 1: in the universe. Um so I think those folks sort
8:54
Speaker 1: of had their brains down to Earth. And someone said
8:57
Speaker 1: black black hole merger very intrigued, which is actually maybe
9:01
Speaker 1: a little bit close to the actual answer. It's on
9:03
Speaker 1: the right track for sure. Those are all good answers.
9:06
Speaker 1: And so we're looking for the biggest explosion in the universe.
9:08
Speaker 1: And so Daniel, lets maybe first talk about you know,
9:12
Speaker 1: what an explosion means and what does it mean for
9:15
Speaker 1: something to explode, and how you would help is measure
9:18
Speaker 1: these things that you measured by like Bruce Willis's or
9:23
Speaker 1: cano reeves units of cano reeves coolness. The way to
9:26
Speaker 1: think about an explosion is that it's a very rapid
9:29
Speaker 1: release of energy, like when you have a nuclear bomb.
9:32
Speaker 1: What's happening there is that you have an rapid release
9:35
Speaker 1: of energy from the fusion or the fission reaction, so
9:38
Speaker 1: rapid that it creates like a shock wave that then
9:40
Speaker 1: zooms out. Like if you had that whole thing happened
9:43
Speaker 1: much more slowly, it wouldn't be an explosion. Wi just
9:46
Speaker 1: like gradually dissipate. It's like if you gradually cranked up
9:50
Speaker 1: the heat of something, that heat would spread up and
9:52
Speaker 1: it wouldn't spread out and it wouldn't necessarily create any destruction.
9:55
Speaker 1: But the reason you have destruction from an explosion that
9:58
Speaker 1: these shock waves is subd release a huge amount of energy.
10:02
Speaker 1: So that's the key for everything is leaving one place
10:05
Speaker 1: really quickly. Energy matter. Yeah, and so the way we
10:10
Speaker 1: measure an explosion is by measuring the energy output. And
10:13
Speaker 1: so we use units of energy. And there's a lot
10:15
Speaker 1: of different kinds of units of energy, so you just
10:17
Speaker 1: got to pick one. Well, what's the standard physics unit
10:20
Speaker 1: for explosions? The unit of the US in astronomy is
10:23
Speaker 1: the ERG, which is kind of a funny unit. It
10:26
Speaker 1: sounds sort of like like a grunt, you know, like
10:29
Speaker 1: it's gonna sounds like an anomotope the media, you know,
10:32
Speaker 1: like oh, somebody exploded, or it sort of sounds like
10:36
Speaker 1: an insult, like God, can you believe the silly thing
10:38
Speaker 1: that ERG said that that can't even calculate the mass
10:42
Speaker 1: of a black hole. It sounds like a bad physics
10:44
Speaker 1: put down or something. It's like what nerds called each
10:47
Speaker 1: other to call each other out. Yeah, but it's actually
10:50
Speaker 1: kind of a cool unit of energy. And I like
10:52
Speaker 1: it because it has a very understandable example, like one
10:56
Speaker 1: ERG is about as much energy it would take a
10:59
Speaker 1: fly to do a push up. Wow, it's that small.
11:02
Speaker 1: It's pretty small. Yes, So it's a unit of energy
11:04
Speaker 1: like jewels, or like jewels per second or jewels per area.
11:08
Speaker 1: What's the what am I thinking? Jewels is a unit
11:11
Speaker 1: of energy? Jewels per second would be power, the would
11:13
Speaker 1: be like watts, and jewels per area would be pressure.
11:16
Speaker 1: But we're talking about just energy, and so ERG is
11:19
Speaker 1: a unit and it's pretty small. You're right. For example,
11:22
Speaker 1: if you calculated, like how many ergs are in the
11:24
Speaker 1: rolling of a bowling ball, that's about a billion ergs.
11:28
Speaker 1: So every time I'm bowling, I'm like putting a billion
11:31
Speaker 1: ergs and like an actual because you pull your back,
11:36
Speaker 1: the energy you spend in rolling that bowling ball is
11:38
Speaker 1: the same as if one billion flies simultaneously do one
11:42
Speaker 1: push up. It's a bit of a weird unit because
11:44
Speaker 1: it's so small, and it's really popular in astronomy, where
11:47
Speaker 1: the numbers are really big. So I wonder if like
11:49
Speaker 1: astronomers use this unit to make their numbers seem bigger.
11:54
Speaker 1: I don't think astronomers need to inflate their numbers, you know,
11:58
Speaker 1: they're like, you know, a billion ideas just doesn't seem
12:01
Speaker 1: like a lot. Let's go with a billion light seconds. Yeah, Well,
12:04
Speaker 1: it's weird because the URG was officially discontinued as a unit.
12:09
Speaker 1: People like, don't use ERG, it's ridiculous, but astronomers still
12:13
Speaker 1: use it. They just like they ignore that ruling officially
12:15
Speaker 1: from the International Court of Units and I made that up,
12:19
Speaker 1: by the way, and they just keep on using it.
12:21
Speaker 1: So we get really big, ridiculous numbers. So does it
12:24
Speaker 1: stand for something or they it literally just just a
12:27
Speaker 1: weird word, or or is it kind of like one
12:29
Speaker 1: of these new millennial you know, text contractions. You know
12:33
Speaker 1: that they're too lazy to write energy, so they just
12:35
Speaker 1: picked the E, the R, and the G a little bit.
12:37
Speaker 1: It's actually got a nice history. It comes from a
12:40
Speaker 1: Greek word urgan, which is the unit of energy, and
12:43
Speaker 1: it's sort of like the eighteen hundreds and so it's
12:46
Speaker 1: a bit outdated and it's it's past its prime, but
12:49
Speaker 1: it still lives on in astronomy. Okay. So it's like
12:52
Speaker 1: an unit of energy like the jewels or calorie or
12:55
Speaker 1: something like that, and it tells you kind of how
12:58
Speaker 1: much energy comes out of this ex osian or thing
13:00
Speaker 1: exploding in a second or in at a time, or
13:04
Speaker 1: just the total energy. Yeah, so you have to integrate
13:07
Speaker 1: over time, and so for example, if you look at
13:09
Speaker 1: something that's continuous explosion like our son. Our son is
13:12
Speaker 1: just a constantly exploding fusion bomb. Then you can quote
13:16
Speaker 1: the energy like per second. For example, the Sun puts
13:20
Speaker 1: out ten to the thirty four ergs per second, So
13:24
Speaker 1: that's a lot of ergs pers, that's a lot of
13:25
Speaker 1: flies doing a lot of push ups every second many
13:29
Speaker 1: that that is basically ten to the thirty four flies
13:33
Speaker 1: every second. But then it depends on the time, right,
13:35
Speaker 1: the Sun is not just one explosion, so it's a
13:38
Speaker 1: constant explosion and it only explodes in the day. Of
13:41
Speaker 1: course at night it tucks away in terms of this
13:46
Speaker 1: is a science podcast, so that's spread misinformation, um. And
13:51
Speaker 1: in a year, you know, it will put out like
13:53
Speaker 1: ten to the forty one ergs. So that sounds like
13:55
Speaker 1: a lot, but it's sort of a touch on. So
13:57
Speaker 1: the bowling balls one billion ergs, the Sun is tend
14:01
Speaker 1: to the thirty four or per second. Yeah, so that's
14:05
Speaker 1: how much energy is coming out of this explosion. Yeah.
14:07
Speaker 1: And then a popular answer of course with supernovas, and
14:10
Speaker 1: it's a great answer because there's a lot of energy
14:12
Speaker 1: put out by a supernova in a very short amount
14:14
Speaker 1: of time. That's like ten to the fifty one ergs.
14:18
Speaker 1: So that's you know, a lot more than individual star,
14:22
Speaker 1: and it is a very short amount of time, right, Yeah,
14:25
Speaker 1: it's like five orders of magnitude. Yeah, it's like ten
14:29
Speaker 1: orders of magnitude compared to one year. And so a
14:31
Speaker 1: supernova puts out about as much energy as our Sun
14:34
Speaker 1: does in its entire lifetime, but the whole thing happens
14:37
Speaker 1: in billions of years, over billions of years. But the
14:39
Speaker 1: whole thing happens over just you know, days, So it's
14:42
Speaker 1: a pretty incredible explosion. If you take all of the
14:45
Speaker 1: energy that the Sun makes over billions of years and
14:48
Speaker 1: compressed it to one instant, that's a supernova. That's a supernova.
14:51
Speaker 1: And that's why it's dramatic. That's what makes it an explosion,
14:54
Speaker 1: is this release of energy in a very short amount
14:56
Speaker 1: of time. If it just gradually leaked that energy under
14:59
Speaker 1: the universe, it wouldn't be as dramatic. It's all about
15:01
Speaker 1: concentrating that energy in a short period. That's why supernovas
15:05
Speaker 1: are so super it's almost like big, you know, concentrating
15:08
Speaker 1: a billion sons in one instant. Yeah, yeah, and that's
15:11
Speaker 1: why they can outshine an entire galaxy for a very
15:14
Speaker 1: short amount of time. They're brilliant, literally, But you're saying
15:18
Speaker 1: the supernoives are not the biggest explosions in the universe.
15:21
Speaker 1: So even if you take a billion sons at the
15:23
Speaker 1: same time and exploded them in one instant, that wouldn't
15:26
Speaker 1: give you the big explosion in the universe. No, So
15:28
Speaker 1: if you put that into your screenplay and expect everybody
15:31
Speaker 1: to be impressed, then astronomers would be underwhelmed. It'd be like, er,
15:37
Speaker 1: that's a lot of ergs, but it still don't impress me. No,
15:40
Speaker 1: that is not the biggest explosion in the universe, and
15:42
Speaker 1: not even close. There are much bigger explosions. But it's
15:45
Speaker 1: a little bit counterintuitive because they come from black holes.
15:49
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, somebody said in the answers that a black
15:53
Speaker 1: hole merger may be the biggest explosion in the universe.
15:56
Speaker 1: So how how how exploding our black hole merger? They
15:59
Speaker 1: are blowdi oscious. They released like a thousand times as
16:03
Speaker 1: much energy as supernova. Wait, so you take a thousand
16:07
Speaker 1: supernovas put them together, that's one black hole merger. That's
16:10
Speaker 1: one black hole merger. Now it depends, of course, on
16:12
Speaker 1: the mass of the black holes and a little bit
16:13
Speaker 1: in the configuration. But we've only seen a few examples
16:16
Speaker 1: and they were pretty dramatic. Wow, that's so a supernova
16:21
Speaker 1: outshines the galaxy, then a black hole merger totally kind
16:25
Speaker 1: of obliterates it. Right, Yeah, but you have to compare
16:28
Speaker 1: how the energy is being released. For a supernova, a
16:30
Speaker 1: lot of the energy is released in the visible spectrum,
16:32
Speaker 1: but most of it is actually invisible. A huge fraction
16:35
Speaker 1: of it is in the neutrinos and in other particles
16:38
Speaker 1: that aren't invisible light. So supernova is super duper bright,
16:42
Speaker 1: but most of the energy is not visible. For a
16:44
Speaker 1: black hole merger, almost all of the energy comes out
16:47
Speaker 1: in invisible forms like creation of gravitational waves, which you
16:51
Speaker 1: need special devices to even see, so that they are
16:54
Speaker 1: huge releases of energy but not necessarily bright. Take a
16:58
Speaker 1: silent killer. It's a dark explosion. There's the title of
17:03
Speaker 1: our movie. Whoever smelled it? Tilted? Whoever smelt it? Oh,
17:09
Speaker 1: you're right, dark explosion is not a good name for
17:12
Speaker 1: a movie. It is an obvious part jip there. But
17:17
Speaker 1: even at a thousand times bigger than a supernova, a
17:20
Speaker 1: black hole merger is still not the biggest exclusion in
17:23
Speaker 1: the universe. It is not it's not even close to
17:26
Speaker 1: King of the Mountain or Queen of the Castle. All right,
17:29
Speaker 1: let's get into what is the biggest exclusion in the universe,
17:32
Speaker 1: and let's talk about this recent discovery of them finding it.
17:35
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. Okay, Daniel, we're
17:51
Speaker 1: talking about the biggest explosion in the universe, and we're
17:54
Speaker 1: not just talking about mel Gibson's career here. And you
17:57
Speaker 1: told me that supernovas are pretty big, like a billion
18:00
Speaker 1: sons explosion at ones, but those are nothing compared to
18:05
Speaker 1: black hole mergers, which are a thousand times bigger, and
18:08
Speaker 1: those even are not the biggest explosions in the universe. Yeah,
18:12
Speaker 1: the biggest explosions in the universe come not from black
18:15
Speaker 1: hole mergers, but from individual super massive black holes and
18:19
Speaker 1: the chaos that they create around them. That's right, because
18:22
Speaker 1: there are different categories of black hole. So like if
18:25
Speaker 1: two little black holes merge, which has I think happens
18:29
Speaker 1: fairly often, right, surprisingly often, you get the mergers of
18:33
Speaker 1: black holes, and those black holes can be you know,
18:34
Speaker 1: the masses of a few sons or tens of sons
18:37
Speaker 1: or hundreds of sons. But there are other kinds of
18:39
Speaker 1: black holes, like the kind we see in the center
18:41
Speaker 1: of our galaxy. They can have millions and millions of
18:45
Speaker 1: solar masses. Oh and those themselves are you're saying, are
18:50
Speaker 1: some of the brightest or biggest explosions in the universe. Yeah,
18:54
Speaker 1: these are things we do not understand very well. But
18:56
Speaker 1: they are gargantulan and they're basically keen or queen in
19:00
Speaker 1: every category. They can get pretty crazy massive. So some
19:03
Speaker 1: black holes are you know, thousands or millions of times
19:07
Speaker 1: the mass of our sun. Yes, and that creates an
19:10
Speaker 1: very intense gravitational field nearby. And so what happens is
19:14
Speaker 1: that the stuff near the black hole gets squeezed and
19:17
Speaker 1: pushed and and excited, and you can generate incredible amounts
19:21
Speaker 1: of radiation and also sometimes enormous explosions on the vicinity
19:26
Speaker 1: of the black hole. Oh I see. So just their
19:29
Speaker 1: very existence and the chaos they produced around them, just
19:33
Speaker 1: from being so crazy massive creates the biggest explosions in
19:37
Speaker 1: the universe, bigger than these black hole mergers and supernoice. Yeah,
19:40
Speaker 1: and it's not something that we understand very well. Like
19:42
Speaker 1: we keep being surprised. We find a huge explosion and
19:45
Speaker 1: we're like, wow, that's bigger than we thought possible. And
19:48
Speaker 1: then somebody finds one that's ten times bigger and they're like,
19:51
Speaker 1: that's insane, what are you talking about? And we're gonna
19:53
Speaker 1: see one that's a thousand times bigger and then and
19:56
Speaker 1: then we'll be over. But it's it's incredible, the scale
19:59
Speaker 1: of these things, the massive these objects, the amount of
20:02
Speaker 1: energy that's stored in them, the amount of energy that's
20:04
Speaker 1: radiated out from them. When nobody has a calculation that
20:07
Speaker 1: explains this, nobody can say, here's my black hole simulation,
20:11
Speaker 1: and it describes how these black holes were formed and
20:14
Speaker 1: explains why they radiate and explode so much. I see,
20:17
Speaker 1: we've seen these crazy explosions from these big black holes,
20:20
Speaker 1: but nobody can actually sort of work it out how
20:23
Speaker 1: that works. Yeah, nobody can even explain why we have
20:26
Speaker 1: these supermassive black holes. If you do simulations of galaxies forming,
20:29
Speaker 1: you don't get black holes this big, and so we
20:32
Speaker 1: don't even understand like what's making these We'll do a
20:34
Speaker 1: whole other podcast episode about like the weird science behind
20:37
Speaker 1: how these things form. But once you have them, then
20:40
Speaker 1: they do all sorts of crazy stuff. You know, people
20:43
Speaker 1: out there might be thinking, like, hold on a second,
20:45
Speaker 1: how do black holes explode or how do black holes
20:47
Speaker 1: emit radiation? Because they're black, nothing's Yeah, their holes they're
20:52
Speaker 1: supposed to be sucking stuff in, and and they do.
20:55
Speaker 1: They do suck stuff in. So anything that goes past
20:57
Speaker 1: the event horizon definitely never coming out. But we're talking
21:01
Speaker 1: about this stuff in the neighborhood, right. A black hole
21:04
Speaker 1: like this is so powerful that it's going to mess
21:06
Speaker 1: up everything nearby? Is it kind of like you know
21:09
Speaker 1: those um Sometimes you go to like a public toilet
21:12
Speaker 1: and you flush it and it's like tourbo charged. Do
21:15
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about? Like there's just like
21:18
Speaker 1: freeloaded or something, and you flush and it's like everything
21:22
Speaker 1: things are sucking down the toilet, but they're also kind
21:24
Speaker 1: of exploding time. I have no idea what you're talking about,
21:27
Speaker 1: but that sounds like a perfect analogy. Yes, and especially
21:31
Speaker 1: because black holes do this really weird thing that they have,
21:34
Speaker 1: these jets. There's two main structures around a black hole
21:37
Speaker 1: that people should be familiar with. One is the accretion disc.
21:40
Speaker 1: That's this disc of stuff that's swirling around the black
21:43
Speaker 1: holes like on deck to get sucked in and people
21:47
Speaker 1: are generally familiar with that, but then shooting out sort
21:50
Speaker 1: of perpendicular to the plane of the accretion disc like
21:52
Speaker 1: on the north and the South pole, are these enormous
21:55
Speaker 1: jets of matter and radiation that can be like longer
21:59
Speaker 1: than entire gall e sees. Yeah, I think you maybe
22:01
Speaker 1: like a good visual is kind of like how you
22:03
Speaker 1: imagine Saturn the planet to have this ring around it.
22:06
Speaker 1: The black holes kind of have a ring of stuff
22:08
Speaker 1: around them too, They have a ring around them, yes, Yeah,
22:11
Speaker 1: and it's like glowing and it's it's gassing and glowing
22:14
Speaker 1: and wild as well because it's being sucked into the
22:17
Speaker 1: giant toilet. Yeah, and the jets create this radiation which
22:21
Speaker 1: is huge. We call those quasars, and we don't understand
22:24
Speaker 1: what's going on there. We think there's some weird thing
22:26
Speaker 1: going on with intense magnetic fields. It's like funneling really
22:29
Speaker 1: high energy particles towards the North pole, so like some
22:32
Speaker 1: sort of reverse Northern Lights effect. Um, And if it's
22:37
Speaker 1: pointed right at Earth, then we call it a we
22:39
Speaker 1: call it a blazer. And those are some of the
22:41
Speaker 1: brightest things in the universe. Yeah, we had a whole
22:44
Speaker 1: podcast about the brightest things in the universe. Yeah, But
22:47
Speaker 1: on top of being the brightest things in the universe,
22:49
Speaker 1: the most massive things in the universe, and being a
22:51
Speaker 1: mystery under themselves, they also create a ridiculous explosions because
22:55
Speaker 1: quasars are not explosions. They're just like a constant funneling
22:59
Speaker 1: of enormal energy like a flashlight kind of. Yeah, they're
23:02
Speaker 1: like a flashlight. But on top of that, these black
23:04
Speaker 1: holes sometimes also create really dramatic explosions. Really yeah, like
23:10
Speaker 1: the top on top of the quazer is like that
23:12
Speaker 1: wasn't enough. They're also doing stuff on the side, and
23:15
Speaker 1: that comes from things going on in the accretion disk.
23:18
Speaker 1: Like you know, there's lumps. Accretion discs aren't totally smooth.
23:22
Speaker 1: You got like, you know, masses and masses of stars
23:25
Speaker 1: in their whole solar systems and enormous lumps of rock
23:29
Speaker 1: bigger than you can imagine. And this stuff sometimes smashes
23:32
Speaker 1: into itself or gets torn apart, and so you get
23:34
Speaker 1: really enormous explosions and again not something that's well understood.
23:38
Speaker 1: Like you see these explosions and it seems like there's
23:41
Speaker 1: more energy and the explosion than is contained in the
23:44
Speaker 1: entire system there. But how does that even work? It
23:47
Speaker 1: means that there's stuff going on there that we don't
23:48
Speaker 1: yet understand. I guess. How do you know that it
23:51
Speaker 1: came from somewhere around a black hole? Like if you
23:54
Speaker 1: see a giant explosion, how do you how can you
23:56
Speaker 1: tell that where it came from? Well, you just look
23:58
Speaker 1: for the center, right, you look for of the stuff
24:00
Speaker 1: that it hit, and you sort of pointed all back.
24:03
Speaker 1: And so in the case of these um explosions, you
24:05
Speaker 1: can see the effect of these explosions on like nearby
24:08
Speaker 1: gas clouds. And for example, you look at a gas
24:10
Speaker 1: cloud and has like a shell in it. It's like
24:13
Speaker 1: looks like part of a spear, and you can tell
24:16
Speaker 1: sort of that sphere points points back to where as
24:19
Speaker 1: you can reconstruct where the explosion was. You know, it's
24:22
Speaker 1: like if somebody drops their coffee, you look at the
24:24
Speaker 1: spill pattern, you can pretty much tell where the coffee hit, right,
24:27
Speaker 1: the same story. Oh, I see, and then you track
24:30
Speaker 1: it down to where it came from, and you see, oh,
24:31
Speaker 1: there's a giant black hole there precisely, So it must
24:34
Speaker 1: have been a an explosion that happened not in the
24:37
Speaker 1: black hole or shooting from the black hole, but just
24:40
Speaker 1: in the chaos around the black hole. Yeah, because we
24:43
Speaker 1: don't think that black holes emit anything, Like, we don't
24:45
Speaker 1: know what's going on inside a black hole. It's one
24:47
Speaker 1: of the favorite questions people writing in abound, like what's
24:50
Speaker 1: going on inside a black hole? Does it look like this?
24:52
Speaker 1: Does it look like that? And I always have to
24:53
Speaker 1: write back and say, we have no idea because nobody
24:57
Speaker 1: knows what's going on inside a black hole. Only Matthew
24:59
Speaker 1: mcconic knows. Nobody knows, and so we can only imagine.
25:05
Speaker 1: But if there are dramatic explosions inside the black hole,
25:08
Speaker 1: they're definitely not getting out. They're not coming out. You
25:11
Speaker 1: could have way crazier stuff happening inside of the black hole,
25:14
Speaker 1: but we would never know. Yeah, We'll remember we asked
25:17
Speaker 1: that quantum gravity theorist what she thought was going on
25:20
Speaker 1: inside a black hole, and she went off on that
25:23
Speaker 1: hilarious digression. You know, maybe their whole universe is in
25:26
Speaker 1: there doing who knows what, and so that's a deep mystery.
25:31
Speaker 1: She used several ers of brain power to come up
25:33
Speaker 1: with a creative answer to that question. Okay, so you're
25:37
Speaker 1: saying the biggest explosions in the universe are not even
25:40
Speaker 1: black holes themselves, it's just the craziness that comes from
25:44
Speaker 1: getting sucked into a giant black hole. I don't know.
25:46
Speaker 1: Don't try to take the credit away from the black
25:48
Speaker 1: hole like it's doing all the work there. It's it's
25:50
Speaker 1: gravitational energy is fueling this craziness. Yeah, but it's happening
25:54
Speaker 1: outside of it, not as part of its existence. It's
25:57
Speaker 1: definitely passed into the horizon. And that other time we
25:59
Speaker 1: talk about where had the size of black holes and
26:02
Speaker 1: we decided to use the event horizon as the radius.
26:04
Speaker 1: But you know, if all the stuff nearby the event
26:07
Speaker 1: horizon is because of the gravity of the black hole,
26:11
Speaker 1: then I think it gets credit. I guess I'm saying.
26:13
Speaker 1: You know, if my kids create a little explosion here,
26:16
Speaker 1: I'm not taking credit for that. If your kids flush
26:20
Speaker 1: your toilet and it splashes onto you, you're gonna blame
26:22
Speaker 1: them for that, though, aren't you. I'm gonna blame it
26:26
Speaker 1: on the toilet manufacturer, not my not me or my kids.
26:29
Speaker 1: The expect the lawsuits, folks. So and so this is
26:31
Speaker 1: just stuff that's around the black hole smashing into itself
26:34
Speaker 1: or being pulled apart, or does it create like a
26:37
Speaker 1: chain reaction? What's actually going on? Like can kind of
26:40
Speaker 1: collision of things really create something bigger than you know,
26:44
Speaker 1: a thousand black hole mergers. Well, you are now at
26:47
Speaker 1: the forefront of knowledge because all ideas you just had
26:50
Speaker 1: are basically what's happening inside offices in astrophysics departments around
26:54
Speaker 1: the country. People are asking the same question. Mind are
26:57
Speaker 1: being blown by this discovery we just made, and people like,
27:00
Speaker 1: well maybe it's this maybe stuff. That's exactly how we start.
27:03
Speaker 1: We're like, I don't know, what are your five top
27:04
Speaker 1: ideas for what this might be? What would that look like?
27:07
Speaker 1: How can we rule those out? Do we know anything
27:09
Speaker 1: about these? And that's how these theories start forming. So
27:12
Speaker 1: we're really at the beginning stages of trying to understand
27:14
Speaker 1: what could cause these explosions, Like if we hadn't seen them,
27:17
Speaker 1: nobody would have predicted them. So so this is where
27:19
Speaker 1: we are. We we've seen these explosions. We're like, whoa,
27:22
Speaker 1: these things are even that black hole mergers, and we've
27:26
Speaker 1: traced them to just supermassive black holes, or at least
27:30
Speaker 1: the area around them. But we don't know what's going on. Yeah,
27:34
Speaker 1: we just know there are crazy intense forces there. And
27:37
Speaker 1: there's really basic stuff about black holes we don't know, like,
27:40
Speaker 1: for example, do they spin. We think they probably spin
27:44
Speaker 1: sometimes because the stuff falling into them spins, and you know,
27:47
Speaker 1: angular momentum is conserved in our universe and so but
27:51
Speaker 1: we don't know. And that could be an enormous source
27:52
Speaker 1: of energy. Like you look at a black hole, it
27:54
Speaker 1: has huge amount of energy just from the mass it's storing.
27:57
Speaker 1: It could additionally have even more energy from its rotation,
28:01
Speaker 1: and that rotation could be fueling all sorts of stuff
28:03
Speaker 1: like these magnetic fields and these explosions could come from
28:06
Speaker 1: the black hole spin. But we don't even know if
28:09
Speaker 1: that's a thing. It's like the toilet itself could be spinning. Yeah,
28:12
Speaker 1: there could be all sorts of weird stuff. And you know,
28:14
Speaker 1: remember how little we really understand about the fundamental nature
28:17
Speaker 1: of the universe. We've explained a tiny fraction of it.
28:20
Speaker 1: And these are the most intense environments anywhere, so there
28:23
Speaker 1: are definitely secrets to be revealed. All right, let's get
28:26
Speaker 1: into what this reason discovery was and what they found
28:29
Speaker 1: and what scientists think could be happening in these giant explosions. First,
28:34
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So take
28:49
Speaker 1: us through the news reports from last week. They think
28:53
Speaker 1: they maybe they found the biggest explosions in the universe
28:57
Speaker 1: ever recorded by humans. That's right. There were a lot
28:59
Speaker 1: of articles going around last week talking about the biggest
29:02
Speaker 1: explosion ever found. And I first got wind of it
29:05
Speaker 1: when I got a tweet from somebody who sent me
29:08
Speaker 1: this headline from the Guardian that read biggest cosmic explosion
29:12
Speaker 1: ever detected left huge dent in space. And somebody sent
29:18
Speaker 1: me this and said, what is going on here? This
29:22
Speaker 1: was Mike Kerr now um, and he asked me to
29:25
Speaker 1: explain that, And so I started reading about it, that
29:27
Speaker 1: it caused a dent in space. It caused a dent
29:30
Speaker 1: in space. And you know, I'm not a big fan
29:31
Speaker 1: of a lot of science reporting. It's a hard job
29:35
Speaker 1: and they have to try to communicate scientific stuff to
29:37
Speaker 1: the general audience and way that makes sense, and you
29:40
Speaker 1: and I know that's difficult. But a dent in space,
29:43
Speaker 1: I don't even know what that means. Maybe this reporter
29:45
Speaker 1: should get a Nobel prize. Just invented a new physics phenomena. Yeah, well,
29:51
Speaker 1: you know in one sense, like there are dent in
29:52
Speaker 1: space all over the place, Like every massive object bends space,
29:56
Speaker 1: so your dentic space and I'm dentic space causing a
29:59
Speaker 1: dent in space right now, right, I hope that buffs out,
30:02
Speaker 1: you know, like do you have insurance for those dents?
30:04
Speaker 1: And my kids are causing a dent in my wallet
30:07
Speaker 1: as well. Um so, but there was a really big
30:11
Speaker 1: explosion and it's a really amazing story because it takes
30:15
Speaker 1: place in the center of a galaxy cluster. A galaxy cluster, remember,
30:19
Speaker 1: is a bunch of galaxies all sort of gravitationally bound together.
30:23
Speaker 1: And in that cluster there's also a lot of leftover
30:26
Speaker 1: gas that was used to make the galaxies. Remember, galaxies
30:29
Speaker 1: are gas that's been coalesced by gravity into stars that
30:33
Speaker 1: are burning. It's a cluster of galaxy, so it's not
30:35
Speaker 1: just like a milky way. It's like a group of
30:38
Speaker 1: milky ways. Yeah, it's a big group of galaxies and
30:41
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of gas that sort of spread out
30:43
Speaker 1: in between them. It must be a huge gas cloud.
30:45
Speaker 1: It's a huge gas cloud, so, you know, bigger than galaxies.
30:48
Speaker 1: Absolutely it's a massive scale thing. And about two thousand sixteen,
30:54
Speaker 1: they were looking at this thing in the X ray,
30:56
Speaker 1: which is a good way to look at the shape
30:57
Speaker 1: of gas clouds because they emit in the X ray,
31:00
Speaker 1: and what they noticed was what looked like a crater.
31:03
Speaker 1: They saw sort of an edge, like a circular edge,
31:05
Speaker 1: and they were like, huh, that looks like sort of
31:07
Speaker 1: the edge of a bubble, almost as if there was
31:10
Speaker 1: a huge explosion. It looks like a constant gas cloud,
31:13
Speaker 1: but inside of it they saw like an empty space. Yeah,
31:16
Speaker 1: they saw a big bubble inside the gas cloud. But
31:19
Speaker 1: this is two thousand sixteen. They didn't think that was
31:21
Speaker 1: an explosion for one reason is it would have to
31:24
Speaker 1: be ridiculously big, like bigger than any explosion ever. So
31:27
Speaker 1: they were just kind of skeptical, like as big as
31:29
Speaker 1: a galaxy or bigger, bigger, like this gas cloud bubble
31:32
Speaker 1: is fifteen times bigger than our galaxy. A bubble inside
31:36
Speaker 1: of a cloud the size of fifteen milky milky ways.
31:40
Speaker 1: Like how many keen in reeves do you need to
31:42
Speaker 1: walk away from that explosion? Just one man, There's only one.
31:48
Speaker 1: He's can handle it. He can do it. He's super
31:51
Speaker 1: galactic I mean he can handle three John Wick movie,
31:55
Speaker 1: just one fight scene. I'm sure he can handle this.
31:58
Speaker 1: And so that was two. And you can look at
32:01
Speaker 1: the edge of that bubble and try to find the
32:03
Speaker 1: center of it, and they did, and at the center
32:05
Speaker 1: of it is a galaxy and that galaxy has at
32:08
Speaker 1: its center a super crazy, ridunculous black hole. Oh, they
32:12
Speaker 1: looked at the center of the bubble and there's a
32:14
Speaker 1: you can actually see the galaxy in the middle. You
32:16
Speaker 1: can see the galaxy in the middle because it shines
32:18
Speaker 1: invisible light, and it's called the oats how do you
32:22
Speaker 1: pronounce this galaxy? Opacas? But you can actually see a
32:28
Speaker 1: black hole in the galaxy, but it's so far away.
32:31
Speaker 1: That's that's crazy. Well, you can see the galaxy, and
32:34
Speaker 1: they know that there's a black hole. They're just sort
32:36
Speaker 1: of by looking at the mass distribution, and so you know,
32:39
Speaker 1: most of these black holes have not been directly imaged.
32:42
Speaker 1: Only a few of them have. That's very difficult. You
32:44
Speaker 1: remember that came out last year. But we can infer
32:46
Speaker 1: the mass to the black hole without directly imaging it,
32:49
Speaker 1: just by sort of the orbiting speeds and stuff like that.
32:52
Speaker 1: It's almost like there was an explosion and there was
32:54
Speaker 1: somebody left in the middle of it. But you know,
32:56
Speaker 1: I guess my question is, wouldn't that galaxy also have
32:59
Speaker 1: blown up? Why didn't that galaxy blow up too? If
33:02
Speaker 1: it pushed away all that guests, that's a great question
33:04
Speaker 1: you should be asked for physicists, because that's exactly on
33:07
Speaker 1: the list of questions people are wondering like this. A
33:10
Speaker 1: lot of this story makes sense and it's consistent with
33:12
Speaker 1: a huge explosion, but there are still a lot of
33:14
Speaker 1: unanswered questions. I think maybe the galasy just farted and
33:17
Speaker 1: everyone was just like clear the room for fifteen galaxies
33:23
Speaker 1: um And so that was two thousand and sixteen. And
33:25
Speaker 1: the reason it's making news now is that the skepticism
33:29
Speaker 1: has been sort of overcome because they found a new
33:32
Speaker 1: piece of evidence to support this like gigantic explosion hypothesis.
33:37
Speaker 1: What did they find, Well, if they looked inside that
33:39
Speaker 1: bubble and they looked for really high speed electrons, basically
33:44
Speaker 1: looked for this stuff doing the exploding, and they found
33:47
Speaker 1: radio emissions consistent with like really really high speed relativistic electrons,
33:52
Speaker 1: And that's what you would expect if there was a
33:53
Speaker 1: huge explosion at these like electrons would get boosted by
33:56
Speaker 1: those shock waves. Fast moving electrons have kind of like
34:00
Speaker 1: a signature, they give off a special signal they do,
34:04
Speaker 1: and you can see those in the radio waves. And
34:06
Speaker 1: so what they've seen is like the crater, and then
34:09
Speaker 1: inside the crater in the radio waves, they've seen electrons
34:12
Speaker 1: emitting at very high speeds and exactly the shape that
34:15
Speaker 1: fits right into the crater. And so it really looks
34:18
Speaker 1: like you have an edge there, like the edge of
34:20
Speaker 1: a shock wave. And those are the two things you
34:22
Speaker 1: would expect to see if you have an explosion, the
34:24
Speaker 1: stuff doing the explosion, and then the sort of the
34:27
Speaker 1: gas being pushed away by those electrons and the shock wave.
34:31
Speaker 1: So that was like a second piece of information that
34:33
Speaker 1: really made it seem like, wow, there's something doing some
34:35
Speaker 1: exploding here. But as you said, it doesn't answer every question.
34:39
Speaker 1: There's still a lot of things about it we don't understand.
34:41
Speaker 1: So you can see both. You can see like the
34:43
Speaker 1: hole and made in the gas cloud, and you can
34:46
Speaker 1: also see the stuff still coming out of this explosion. Yeah, precisely,
34:50
Speaker 1: And you can use all that together to measure the
34:52
Speaker 1: energy of this. You know, Grandma explosion. The champion of
34:56
Speaker 1: the world, all right, hit us with the Earth's how many?
35:01
Speaker 1: How many flies are pushing up in this explosion? That's
35:04
Speaker 1: the size of fifty milky ways. Yes, I remember supernovas
35:07
Speaker 1: ten to the fifty one. Black hole mergers are like
35:09
Speaker 1: ten of the fifty four. This thing is like ten
35:12
Speaker 1: to the sixty one or ten to the sixty two ergs.
35:16
Speaker 1: I don't even know the name for that scientific prefix.
35:19
Speaker 1: What is it? A million times more than a black
35:21
Speaker 1: hole merger? Which is which is itself? You know, a
35:25
Speaker 1: bazillion times more than a supernova. Yeah, it's something like
35:29
Speaker 1: millions or ten million black hole mergers simultaneously. So this
35:33
Speaker 1: is this is the biggest explosion anybody has ever seen.
35:37
Speaker 1: And you know, like I said earlier, this is the
35:39
Speaker 1: biggest explosion we've seen. We haven't even been looking that long,
35:42
Speaker 1: and so it's definitely more stuff going out on out there.
35:46
Speaker 1: Like if every time we look we see something bigger,
35:48
Speaker 1: that suggested there's a lot more stuff out there we
35:50
Speaker 1: haven't even seen. There could be something bigger explosion than this,
35:54
Speaker 1: almost certainly, Almost certainly, and especially because we don't understand
35:57
Speaker 1: the mechanism right, and we think that you need our
36:00
Speaker 1: supermassive black holes, and we know there's a lot of
36:02
Speaker 1: those out there, and so there's a lot of opportunity
36:06
Speaker 1: for bigger explosions. So they'll probably a new king, you know,
36:09
Speaker 1: a new new champion explosion crownd every few years from
36:12
Speaker 1: now on the King of the Herds. But like I said,
36:15
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things we don't understand about it.
36:17
Speaker 1: One question is when you raised is like why is
36:19
Speaker 1: that galaxy still there the right And so they're trying
36:23
Speaker 1: to understand like maybe the explosion happened slightly off center
36:27
Speaker 1: or only went in one direction, because they see this
36:29
Speaker 1: only on one side of the black hole but not
36:32
Speaker 1: on the other, Like where is the explosion on the
36:35
Speaker 1: other side. It's sort of missing, which is what you mean,
36:38
Speaker 1: like it only exploded it to one side. We can't
36:42
Speaker 1: see it on the other side. And it might be
36:44
Speaker 1: that it did explode in that side, but it didn't
36:46
Speaker 1: there wasn't gas there to sort of leave this impression,
36:50
Speaker 1: or that the explosion was like weirdly asymmetric, which would
36:53
Speaker 1: be really weird because then it would like be a
36:55
Speaker 1: jet he would like push this galaxy through the universe,
36:58
Speaker 1: which would be crazy oh wow. So it sort of
37:01
Speaker 1: exploded towards us kind of, and so we can't tell
37:04
Speaker 1: what's on the other side. Well, it didn't explode towards us,
37:06
Speaker 1: exploded sort of an angle that's um, not exactly towards
37:10
Speaker 1: us and not exactly perpendicular, but in the direction of
37:13
Speaker 1: a big cloud of gas that's sort of left a
37:15
Speaker 1: big footprint. On the other side. There either there's not
37:19
Speaker 1: gas there to leave a footprint, or the explosion didn't happen.
37:22
Speaker 1: So we're not quite sure. You know, we don't have evidence, um,
37:25
Speaker 1: and absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So we
37:28
Speaker 1: don't really know what's going on on the other side.
37:30
Speaker 1: Well I think, I think, Daniel, you can just go
37:32
Speaker 1: ahead and press your alien button. I know you're dying
37:34
Speaker 1: to press the Alian button. It's aliens who build a
37:37
Speaker 1: giant galaxy engine and they're moving their galaxy, isn't it
37:41
Speaker 1: or you know, blame it on alien physicists. Some alien
37:44
Speaker 1: physicists build a particle collider and it went bad, and wow,
37:47
Speaker 1: was there a bad explosion. It doesn't matter how many
37:51
Speaker 1: lab coats they were wearing. They are obliterated. Oh man,
37:55
Speaker 1: So the big mystery nobody knows what could have cost
37:58
Speaker 1: is or how I could have been so big, and
38:01
Speaker 1: and nobody knows why that galaxy is still standing there. Yeah,
38:05
Speaker 1: but it's exactly the kind of mystery we need to
38:07
Speaker 1: advance science. Whenever we see something out of the extreme,
38:10
Speaker 1: something that tells us what's possible, it makes us think
38:13
Speaker 1: more broadly. But the kind of things that are happening
38:16
Speaker 1: out there, it's exactly what we need to sort of
38:18
Speaker 1: open our minds and push our ideas even further. And
38:21
Speaker 1: so every time we discover something bigger, something heavier, something smaller,
38:25
Speaker 1: it pushes these extremes. And the extremes are really valuable
38:28
Speaker 1: for helping us understand what's possible because that's going to
38:31
Speaker 1: reveal sort of the fundamental nature of the whole structure.
38:34
Speaker 1: It gets you to rethink about the rule what you
38:38
Speaker 1: thought were the rules of the universe. Yeah, and so
38:41
Speaker 1: people are excited to work on this kind of stuff,
38:43
Speaker 1: you know, and answering questions like why is the galaxy
38:45
Speaker 1: still there? What happened on the other side, or why
38:47
Speaker 1: is the explosion still going on? Or our more explosion
38:50
Speaker 1: is going to come from this black hole? We don't know,
38:53
Speaker 1: but it makes people excited to monitor other supermassive black
38:56
Speaker 1: holes around here. And also people should not be worried
38:59
Speaker 1: because this happened three ninety million light years away and
39:05
Speaker 1: obviously a long time ago, a long time ago. Yeah, yeah,
39:08
Speaker 1: and so the energy of that enormous explosion dispersed so
39:11
Speaker 1: much that you know, we're not in danger, all right,
39:14
Speaker 1: So that is Offecially, the new biggest explosion in the
39:17
Speaker 1: universe is um, what's the name again, opie Ocus. Congratulations
39:23
Speaker 1: to the Opiecus galaxy. And maybe in your press release
39:26
Speaker 1: you shouldn't include some information about how to pronounce your name. Yeah,
39:30
Speaker 1: that would that would be helpful. Um. And so, but
39:33
Speaker 1: it's still a giant mystery, it seems. It seems like, um,
39:38
Speaker 1: we are trying to find out, but we may never
39:40
Speaker 1: find out. Yep. And it just continues the run of
39:43
Speaker 1: black holes sort of maxing out all the categories. They
39:46
Speaker 1: are the most powerful, they are the brightest, they are
39:48
Speaker 1: the darkest, they make the biggest explosions. They're sort of
39:51
Speaker 1: hogging all the all the champion categories in sort of
39:54
Speaker 1: the universe extremes until somebody finds hyper black holes, lacquer holes,
40:01
Speaker 1: the black holes. They seem to break all the rules.
40:05
Speaker 1: They hold secrets of the universe, um their incredible objects,
40:09
Speaker 1: and I hope that one day we get to explore
40:11
Speaker 1: one from a safe Give me somebody listening to this podcast,
40:15
Speaker 1: one of our young listeners might be the one who
40:18
Speaker 1: discovered these things, or goes there even yeah, or just
40:21
Speaker 1: cracks open the secret to make black holes work and
40:23
Speaker 1: reveal something incredible about the universe and changes the way
40:27
Speaker 1: we think about our universe and the way we fit
40:29
Speaker 1: into it. I mean, that's the scale of discoveries that's
40:31
Speaker 1: available when it comes to black holes. People will look
40:34
Speaker 1: back in hundred two years and be like, wow, those
40:36
Speaker 1: people understood nothing. So the next time you look out
40:39
Speaker 1: into the nice sky and see all the amazing things
40:42
Speaker 1: and potentially giants exploding things that are having out there,
40:46
Speaker 1: I hope you take a minute and you think erg.
40:51
Speaker 1: So congratulations to our new champion, and thank you to
40:54
Speaker 1: all the listeners who wrote in and asked us to
40:57
Speaker 1: talk about this topic. It was a lot of fun.
40:58
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Before you
41:09
Speaker 1: still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
41:12
Speaker 1: please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
41:15
Speaker 1: You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
41:18
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at
41:21
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
41:25
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
41:28
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
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Speaker 1: My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
41:35
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah.